In truth, because trans people are often forced to remain silent out of fear, any attempt to stand up for ourselves and counter conventional wisdom is seen by some members of the public as the so-called mob descending.

In recent works by cis writers on trans people, a common theme seems to be to emphasize the “unspeakable.” As some commentators see it, as trans individuals, we have been newly embraced by those in the politically correct mainstream, and no ill may be spoken of us under the threat of online backlash. But in truth, because trans people are often forced to remain silent out of fear, any attempt to stand up for ourselves and counter conventional wisdom is seen by some writers as the so-called mob descending.

This idea ties into a larger, more deeply troubling discourse that treats what is already widely spoken as “unsayable” and what is rare, authentic, and difficult as “political correctness,” magically oppressing those able to speak from perches like the New York Times or the Guardian. The ugly things spoken about trans women in full view of the public are not brave strikes against a stifling monoculture by any means. The concern-trolling, questions, and jokes about us are neither new nor unsayable. They are, in fact, what is normative, delegitimizing our voices and pushing us into a genuine silence that is directly tied to our high rate of suicide.

This has been redoubled with the conversation surrounding Rachel Dolezal—a white woman caught pretending to be Black while at the helm of a local NAACP chapter. It has brought hell upon the heads of Black women in particular, as well as all light-skinned people of color. It also managed to strike forcefully at trans people, who have long fielded unflattering comparisons between our lives and the usually hypothetical example of someone like Dolezal, a person who “transitioned” to another race. It’s once again inflamed the rage of those who feel their free speech is threatened by our vocal existence. Why, they ask, can they not ask pointed questions about the similarity between trans people and white people who want to be Black?

As I wrote recently for Feministing, what is seen as unspeakable by cis writers who are “just asking questions” is, in reality, incredibly common. A recent New York Times op-ed by Dr. Elinor Burkett about the media blitz around Caitlyn Jenner not only made the silly “transracial” comparison while assuming a brave posture, but also used that mantle of self-styled courage to say that trans women were not really women. She argued, in essence, that we have residual male privilege and are attempting to redefine what it means to be a woman. To her, these dime-a-dozen stereotypes were unspeakable, because they had been challenged in the past.

A far more moderate editorial by Hadley Freeman at the Guardian, meanwhile, condemned the cruelty of Burkett’s more sweeping attacks, but nevertheless suggested that it was perfectly “reasonable” to ask whether trans woman MMA fighter Fallon Fox was benefitting from testosterone in her bouts and argued that “debate” on such matters was being “shouted down.”

But if questions like these are so unspeakable, why do we hear them so often? These ideas about who and what trans women are have bedevilled us all for years. Proclamations about our supposed privilege and appropriation date back to the mid-1970s at least; comparisons of us to deluded white people pretending to be people of color or people who think they’re dolphins are also painfully common; the borderline superstitious belief that trans women athletes have an inherent physical advantage over cisgender women has been around at least since the days of Renee Richards.

In reality, it is often the unfiltered voices of trans women themselves—most especially poorer trans women, trans women of color, and trans sex workers—who say what is genuinely unsayable and risk harm because of it. We can face online aggression like some of these cis writers do, and it is often of an uglier order; we also live in a physical world where hostility toward us takes on a terrifyingly tactile life.

The “debate” some cis writers, like Margaret Wente or Alice Dreger, want to have about trans childhood is about whether or not we’re starting transition too early—they believe so-called transgender ideologues are potentially ruining the happy, healthy cis lives of legions of children. No thought is ever given to how torturous it might be to delay transition for trans people of all genders. And if trans women do delay, we are left being chided by people like Elinor Burkett for not having lived most of our lives as women; we are thus unworthy of being heard.

What emerges from this mélange of contradiction is the fact that individuals who take these positions often do not even want a debate—if any reply to them that contravenes their expectations is seen as bullying or shouting down, after all, it isn’t much of a debate. Instead, they seem to want an excuse to silence what challenges them. They want to tell us to pipe down; to stop essaying on feminist politics, or youth organizing, or health care; and to unquestioningly submit once more to their designated meanings for us.

This is not a theoretical exercise for us. These ideas have had real consequences on our lives, often written in our flesh. We can face police action, for instance, for “stating” the fact of our existence. In just one recent example, activist Monica Jones was arrested in Arizona for “manifesting prostitution” when she was merely walking down the street while Black and trans, a conviction which was finally overturned after years of struggle. Jones, further, was classified as a “possible threat” to the Australian community after visiting the country as a social work student, likely because, as the Guardian put it, she’d been “involved in a high profile legal challenge involving sex work and trans women.” The very speech used defensively by all sex workers, cis or trans, such as inquiring if someone is a police officer, has been criminalized in Arizona. One wonders where the self-styled defenders of the “unsayable” are here.

CeCe McDonald, meanwhile, found herself vilified for defending herself against a man who was trying to kill her. Loud and belligerent, physically violent and spewing slurs, this man with a swastika tattoo seemed like a cartoon character of bigotry come to life. And yet even he was met with more sympathy from much of the public than McDonald, whose audacity of self-defence disrupted the narrative of supine trans women eager to take what we can get. Her attacker tragically died; McDonald spent a year and a half in prison for trying to save her own life.

Or take Connecticut’s Jane Doe, a young trans girl formerly in the care of the Department of Children and Families, whom the state tried to put in a men’s prison without trial after she defended herself in the hostile environment of a youth detention facility. The DCF fought her every step of the way when she challenged this unconstitutional act, one that was cheered on by an array of letters to the editor simply because she was trans. Because she was bad, went the logic, she would not be accorded the so-called privilege of having her gender recognized.

From injustices like these; to mistreatment by parents who believe, like Wente and Dreger, that they should have final say over trans youth’s lives and bodies; to the historical exclusion of trans health care from both state and private plans thanks in part to the work of some radical feminists; we face real-life harm from what may seem like hypothetical ideas to those not directly affected by them.

We cannot talk openly about our sex lives. Even though we’re always luridly asked about them, many cis people don’t like truthful answers when we deign to give them—and we often do not for justified fear of misrepresentation. If a trans woman says she enjoys having sex with her penis, will that undermine her gender in the eyes of cis people? Will it be used by doctors to deny her further medical transition? After all, attending therapists have often denied trans patients further care on that basis—avoiding sexual use of your birth genitals has often been required. Will some cis feminists say it’s proof of her inherent “manhood”? If a trans woman says she enjoys vaginal sex, is this proof of her “autogynephilia” (the pseudoscientific term for a trans woman who supposedly gets off on the idea of being a woman)? If a trans woman of color, like Laverne Cox, poses nude, is she signalling her anti-feminism?

We are unable to talk in clear terms about why so many of us do sex work without having to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of anti-sex-work feminism and conservative prudery; we are either condemned as dupes of patriarchy twice over, or as symbols of the depth of society’s moral degradation and perversity. In each case, we are treated as little more than rescue projects to be erased through our salvation.

Under this chorus of powerful voices defining us out of existence, is it any wonder we’re so vulnerable to discrimination and various forms of self-harm? The way that many cis people treat our genders as a privilege to be taken away at a whim—should they decide they dislike us or disapprove of our words or actions—crystallizes this. What freedom of speech can we be truly said to have when that existential threat hangs over our heads?

Our chimeric politicized forms—the way we can stand for patriarchy or Gomorrah all at once—are a result of the voicelessness imposed on us. It was why even the most inoffensive, media-friendly, polite request from a trans woman’s lips, “call me Caitlyn,” read to many cis people as an unforgivably aggressive demand. Caitlyn Jenner’s story was, in so many ways, perfect by cis standards: She is unthreatening, attractive, and happy, and a rich white person to boot, and yet even she couldn’t escape sniping directed at her for merely existing as herself. What chance do the rest of us have in that climate?

This is changing, of course. Space has been steadily opened for a somewhat wider plurality of voices and portrayals, and we do hear more regularly from women like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, who defy convention by being openly political. But we are still a long way from having our perspectives on our own lives considered equal to those of cisgender people. Meanwhile, we must be subjected to carping about how Rachel Dolezal proves the sham of trans women’s existence, and have this treated as either a shocking insight or a “gotcha” by a political smorgasbord of transphobes from the far right to the far left.

When we do speak on our own accord these days, it is often on social media, a profoundly imperfect platform whose very architecture encourages abuse and nuance-free discourse. But its poisonous open forum allows us to say the normally unsayable, even if it is uncouth, unkind, or aggressive. I am of two minds about what this space of allegedly cathartic expectoration does for us, to be sure. On the one hand, we can speak a bit more freely, and there’s a chance to hear from people we might never have before. On the other, it is a limiting and corrupting space that quantifies popularity and encourages outrageous behaviour in the name of point-scoring. It is not always conducive to healthy community. But it’s oftentimes all we have.

For a number of well-placed cisgender writers, academics, and critics, so used to mainstream narratives of trans existence that were written and packaged with them in mind, the unfiltered realities of trans people on social media can seem like an attack regardless of the content. Some trans people unhelpfully fill individuals’ mentions with endless litanies of “fuck you,” but many others patiently and vulnerably explain the realities of the situation and still find themselves seen as censors. It’s not merely a matter of cis commentators focusing on the abusive minority here; any contradiction of their received beliefs is seen as an attack. This is why Hadley Freeman saw criticism of her bunk testosterone thesis as “shouting down.”

If our speech is not silent, it is seen as too loud to hear and discern. In either case, what is truly unspeakable is anything we have to say.

You know feminism must be getting trendy if groups who claim to abhor it nonetheless would like a piece of the action. Take leading members of the GOP, for example. As Media Matters captured, CNN had a rather baffling puff piece this week with Mindy Finn, former media strategist for the Republican National Committee. Finn got a full four minutes, without being challenged, to claim that there’s no conflict between being a conservative and a feminist; she even implied that it’s narrow-minded to insist that adherence to basic liberal principles is part of feminism. Don’t believe the RNC hype. “Feminism” is a broad umbrella, absolutely, but it’s not so broad that people who fight efforts to secure women’s equality fit under it.

If it weren’t so sad that this was being passed off as “journalism,” this CNN segment would almost be funny. Finn accused feminists of having a “narrow conversation.” “Women’s power, women’s political power might have been limited to talking about reproductive rights,” she added. Instead of a supposedly “narrow” conversation about things like equal pay, reproductive rights, ending gendered violence, and ending workplace discrimination, Finn seems to think the better idea would be to refocus discussion on getting a few more women, ideally Republicans, into office. (Pro-choicers have been effectively increasing the ranks of women in power, by the way, for decades.) How that is broader, Finn does not explain.

It’s a common tactic of the right these days: accusing people who defend reproductive rights of reducing women to their “vaginas.”

This is a nonsense meme on two levels. For one, it’s simply not true. Not a single Democrat accused of this has run on a platform limited to protecting reproductive choice. Even Mark Udall, nicknamed Mark Uterus by Republican opponents for his focus on reproductive health issues, had a broad economic agenda, strong support for LGBTQ rights, and an interest in fighting global warming. In contrast, Republicans of late have become so singularly obsessed with controlling women’s bodies that the Texas legislature nearly broke into a literal fistfight when some Republicans dared consider the possibility of making something other than attacking women’s rights a priority this year. (Those Republicans eventually relented to their vagina-obsessed colleagues and have returned to the all-abortion-all-the-time priority system.)

Second of all, people who support reproductive rights don’t do so in a vacuum, but generally support a broad range of feminist and pro-woman policies. Indeed, congressional pro-choicers have been fairly busy lately when it comes to the feminist agenda, pushing legislation addressing sexual violence and equal pay. Abortion is inextricably tied up into a whole array of partisan concerns. The same Republicans who oppose abortion rights also killed an equal pay bill, even though it was a limited bill that would mostly make it easier for women to find out what male colleagues make. The same Republicans very nearly killed the previously unassailable Violence Against Women Act, though the “war on women” meme made this so embarrassing they finally had to give up the fight. Still, nearly twice as many Republicans voted against it as for it.

Finn and her Republican cronies would like you to believe there’s all these women out there, fighting the good fight while also opposing abortion rights, but there just isn’t. Being opposed to reproductive rights is firmly linked, both in Congress and in the general voting public, with overall sexist attitudes toward women.

Indeed, the notion that there’s some kind of pro-woman or even feminist agenda that is compatible with anti-choice views is belied by Finn’s own interview. She claims that these mythical conservative feminists advocate for “women’s equality and success,” but never actually says how. Not one policy is mentioned: Nothing on single-pay health care, no ideas on how to combat discrimination, not even any acknowledgement that sexism is a thing that exists. This is no surprise. Substantive bills helping women outside of the realm of reproductive rights don’t come from Republicans. The best you get is when they offer watered-down versions of bills like the Violence Against Women Act, with the clear message being, “If we must do something for women, can we at least do less?”

It’s really rich of Finn to accuse real feminists of being “narrow” when the conservative feminist agenda is empty. Even if reproductive rights was all feminism was about—which it isn’t—at least that’s one more agenda item than is on display here.

Instead of discussing policy, Finn tries to redirect your attention to a handful of Republican women who would very much like to have a lot of power for themselves by winning office. While getting more women into office—and into business and into all sorts of arenas in life—is a feminist goal, it’s silly and reductive to act like simply having a few more women on C-SPAN is a meaningful substitute for true equality. Having more women politicians is an empty gesture if those women refuse to help everyone else out. Women need things like equal pay, safe workplaces, and yes, reproductive rights, none of which these supposedly “feminist” conservatives are going to offer them.

The irony in all this is that reproductive rights are a far more essential part of securing women’s equality than simply electing women to office. If women can’t control something as basic as when they give birth, they are going to fall behind men economically and politically. Finn may talk big about “role models,” but looking up to a Carly Fiorina-type doesn’t help you if you have to quit your job because you can’t afford child care.

The people who want to reduce women to their vaginas are those who want to take control of reproduction away from us. They want our bodies to rule us and determine our lives, our own hopes and dreams be damned. That’s what is truly reductive here.

Honestly, to hear conservatives like Finn talk, you’d think that it was just a remarkable coincidence that the rapid expansion of women’s access to education and career opportunities just happened simultaneously with the expansion of abortion rights and access to reliable contraception. Surely no one believes that. Indeed, the likeliest reason that there’s been an explosion in attacks on abortion rights and contraception access in recent years is because it’s a reaction to feminism’s popularity and a direct attempt to turn back the clock on women’s progress before it’s too late.

But, as with many things on the right, admitting as much out loud is perceived as toxic to their chances with moderate voters. Instead, the strategy is to pretend to be pro-woman—even to hint that you might be kind of pro-choice, even!—to get some swing votes and, once in office, to go to town trying to dismantle women’s rights. Conservative “feminism” is just another iteration of the same theme.

Throughout these efforts, students say, labels like “pro-choice” and “pro-life” took a backseat to story-sharing—perhaps offering insight about ways that young activists, far from being apathetic or disinterested, are engaging their peers about issues of reproductive rights and justice.

The power of storytelling to combat stigma and the power of art to open hearts came together last month as students on 95 college campuses around the country participated in the 1 in 3 Campaign’s “Week of Artivism.” From April 13 through 19, activists posted “pop-up” displays, some with the permission of their administrations, others as guerrilla actions. These featured real people’s abortion stories in a variety of locations, including quads, students unions, and even bathroom stalls. Throughout these efforts, students say, labels like “pro-choice” and “pro-life” took a backseat to story-sharing—perhaps offering insight about ways that young activists, far from being apathetic or disinterested, are engaging their peers about issues of reproductive rights and justice.

The findings of a recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute support this affinity for storytelling. Millennials report that personal experience with abortion is the biggest factor in their views on reproductive rights policies. Eight in ten who have had an abortion and more than 60 percent of those who know a close friend or family member has had one say it should be legal in all or most cases.

That tendency to equate the personal with the political may explain the way that young activists have gravitated toward campaigns that focus on storytelling, and the “Week of Artivism” was no exception. Student organizers watched their efforts spark a dialogue on their campuses as awareness about the need for reproductive health care access led to widespread, nuanced discussion of views on abortion. They say it didn’t seem to matter whether the art was posted for a week or a day; once their peers were presented with life experiences and information they hadn’t considered before, the conversation continued in classrooms and around campus.

According to student activist and Michigan State Students for Choice public relations coordinator Emma Walter, the pop-up art and discussion actions also tapped into the way millennials “look to build new vehicles for change” through social media and creativity.

“The graphics received a very positive response from students,” said Walter. At Michigan State, she explained, “We held the event outside to capture the foot traffic where it would receive more attention. We were quite pleased with the reception from students, as many took time to view the stories and also share their support through taking their own pictures with the displays.”

Campaign director Julia Reticker-Flynn explained that kind of interactive response is what the 1 in 3 Campaign was designed to provoke.

“We see art as integral in creating this shift in culture,” she said. “Our aim during these weeks is to provide an opportunity for young people to create artistic displays in their communities that challenge stigma around abortion and ignite a new conversation—one steeped in empathy and respect.”

Conversations around shame had already begun to take place before the campaign at Colorado Mountain College, where Molly Goldberg, student activist coordinator for Amnesty International, was moved to participate in the pop-up art because of a previous attempt by a stranger to stigmatize abortion.

“I’ve always been a human rights activist and reproductive rights have been important to me, especially because I’ve had an abortion myself,” said Goldberg. Although she’d prioritized other issues in the past, she said, “I had an epiphany when we were out after an [anti-drone] action with Amnesty International.”

Seemingly out of nowhere, someone who approached the group of activists randomly began telling them how abortion was wrong—that it “ruined women.”

“A woman in the group of eight of us said, ‘I had an abortion and it didn’t ruin me,’” Goldberg recounted. “And then all of us said we had had one too—all eight of us. I realized it’s common, but still so stigmatized.”

At Colorado Mountain College, the administration took down the displays, which Goldberg said could have been a timing issue. Her group had unknowingly picked “school visit day” for the guerilla action; the administration, she said, could have just been avoiding conflict with prospective students’ parents.

Still, she noted, this reaction was itself emblematic of the stigma people who have abortions face. “In some ways the administration’s actions spoke volumes as to why we were doing the action; they took it down because of the stigma and it really pissed people off,” said Goldberg.

The displays coming down definitely didn’t stop the conversation on campus, either.

“I heard stories from kids that their entire three-hour math class turned into a debate on choice,” said Goldberg. The discussion was complex, she reported; as students shared their own stories, some peers who had formerly taken positions of banning abortion except in cases of rape or incest shifted their viewpoints.

Reticker-Flynn said the sharing of stories did more than change minds on some campuses: “Students at Washington University in St. Louis said that the visibility of these stories reminded students who have had an abortion that they are not alone.” Goldberg, too, noted that the incident with her administration also prompted her to think about how individual people are affected and silenced by stigma.

“I wonder if the reason [abortion] can be traumatic for some women is the stigma; society has made it a traumatic experience for them,” she said.

Irene Suh, co-president of Students for Choice at the University of Michigan, said that the pop-up art’s statistics on who has abortions and how common they are were especially effective on a campus she describes as “predominantly white” and relatively economically privileged.

“People are still very surprised—even people supportive of the choice to have abortion—at the ‘1 in 3’ statistic,” said Suh. “People think of it as a very rare occasion. Then they read these stories and they think ‘Wow, this could be me; I totally could have been in this situation.’”

For Suh, recognizing her privilege and realizing that low-income women and women of color disproportionately struggle to access reproductive health care has shaped her activism. “Not only is it really stigmatized, but it’s hard to access,” she said. “I had no idea this was an issue for people.”

Both Goldberg and Suh describe the success of the “artivism” campaign as fostering conversation through an intersectional feminist lens.

“I think the most surprising conversations were with a lot of the male students who were feminist allies,” said Goldberg. “The conversations actually led into feminism and the debate around the inclusivity of feminism, how it can be a bad word, and how it sometimes doesn’t include women of color. It was surprising that people were understanding how the social justice issues affect each other.”

Suh’s history with sexual abuse led her to valuing bodily autonomy as well as effective, comprehensive education on personal agency. Since becoming more involved in abortion rights, the scope of her activism has broadened along with her perspective.

“Coming into college I supported abortion, but I didn’t know why it was important—just that the root of the issue is that people want to assert bodily autonomy,” said Suh. “For religious and political issues, this very common medical procedure one in three women have is stigmatized. I started thinking about other issues—especially the struggles for racial justice—and how reproductive justice is integral to that.”

Suh has worked to assert her agency and feels privileged to have control over her body, even if it was a process. She’s fighting to make that same control a reality for everyone.

“It took me a while to get there,” she said. “My hope is that by talking to people and sharing stories like through the 1 in 3 Campaign, we’re allowed to stand up and say, ‘We can do this!’”

The type of unflinching positivity and drive exhibited by student activists like Suh flies in the face of the reputation with which millennials are frequently saddled. Media and some older organizers can frequently disregard students or younger people as “slacktivists.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, our country’s youth are written off as lazy and self-absorbed—or at least indifferent and apolitical, especially on abortion rights.

All of the student activists who spoke with RH Reality Check vehemently contested the widespread characterization of them and their peers.

“I disagree with the portrayal of millennials as a monolithic disengaged group,” said Walter. “My generation is just as engaged as previous generations in our approach to social issues.”

Goldberg sighed with almost tangible annoyance.

“Everyone talks shit on millennials and says that they’re self-centered and I haven’t had that experience at all,” she said. “They’ve been very open to changing the world, which sounds idealistic, I guess, but it’s true.”

That idealism comes from their connectivity, according to Goldberg. “I think the access we have to social media and the knowledge we have about it is used as a reason to write us off, when that is actually an advantage,” she said. “We are more connected to people around the world than anyone has been before and those connections inspire us to take action. Millennials are able to be idealistic because we’ve seen it—the Arab Spring, the Black Lives Matter movement. Social media and connectivity is bringing us together.”

Suh echoed the virtues of online connections: “The mass media wouldn’t be educating the public, so people are getting online and talking to their communities.”

Both Suh and Goldberg expressed aggravation at the characterization of their generation as specifically uninvolved in or unable to understand governance.

“It’s frustrating—especially with the last election—with everyone saying young people didn’t vote,” said Suh. “There’s this assumption that we’re all being selfish and focusing on what we want to do. The reality is that people in my age group are incredibly educated on these issues.”

According to Reticker-Flynn, the students who contacted the 1 in 3 Campaign about bringing the “artivism” project to their schools are committed to equity and innovative outreach.

“Many of the students participating are leaders of reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations on their campuses,” said Reticker-Flynn. The goal was to build on the work and energy of those individuals to spread both messaging and involvement.

“It is the hope that through this action, student leaders will be able to reach students who are new to these issues and engage them in powerful conversations,” Reticker-Flynn added.

“We have great ideas on engaging,” said Suh. “The bounds of feminism have been pushed by young people making these issues palatable. That’s a really great [contribution] that maybe we don’t get enough credit for.”

Content note: This article contains descriptions and images of graphic threats that include slurs and descriptions of sexual assault.

What’d you do last weekend? Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah, I’m glad you had a nice time. Me? Oh, not much. I just spent three days reporting the myriad rape and death threats I received over social media.

See, I accidentally broke the news about my secret gun vaporizer on Twitter. The gun vaporizer—a real thing that totally exists—modifies the molecular makeup of firearms and renders them into airy nothingness. Of course, the gun vaporizer has its limitations: It cannot vaporize all the guns at once. I mean, it’s not like this is science fiction here. Perhaps unfortunately for white men, their predilection for committing mass murder has put their weapons first in line for vaporization under the evil matriarchal regime of which I am the ruling despotress.

I understand that when the white men see their guns disappear into thin air before their very eyes—a fate that most certainly awaits them, due to the actual existence of an actual gun vaporizer over which I have complete actual control—they may feel distress or sadness. This is why my evil matriarchal regime will be collecting white men’s tears during the vaporization process, for research purposes and also to sweeten the beverage of my people: a strong tea brewed of oppression and misandry. It is, of course, naturally very bitter.

You may, at this point, get the feeling that I’m pulling your leg. You may understand me to be joking. You may rightly perceive that gun vaporizers do not exist, and by extension deduce that I do not own one, nor do I intend to use it, on a white guy’s gun or anybody else’s.

If that is the case, you are leaps and bounds ahead of the Daily Caller’s political reporter, Patrick Howley, who apparently felt he got the scoop of the century when he discovered my public tweets on my public Twitter profile following the news that a white man had gone on a shooting rampage in Mesa, Arizona. He then crafted 188 credulous words about my nefarious plans. As a result, hundreds of angry white guys descended upon my Twitter and Facebook accounts over the weekend—helped along by the fact that the libertarian-bro clearinghouse Infowars and the white supremacist Nazi group Stormfront both picked up the Caller‘s, uh, “story”—demanding that I rescind my plans to vaporize all the world’s guns starting with the white guys’, and threatening to rape and murder me if I did not comply.

Many members of the Daily Caller‘s esteemed readership suggested I “come and take it” and provided other variations on the theme—”I will shoot your smelly ass dead” was a colorful one—even though the whole point of the vaporizer is to ensure that there’s nothing to “come and take,” as it were. Still more of these guys seemed unduly fixated on the fact that I’m a fat lady, though one apparent stalker who claimed to be following me around the park seemed to think I looked pretty good, regardless.

I posted screenshots of these threats to my own Facebook and Twitter, just in case any of these guys decided to actually try and act on any of them—many came from members of the Open Carry Tarrant County group, based out of my own hometown. I wanted a paper trail, and I didn’t want the admins and moderators at Facebook and Twitter to be the only ones who knew where it was.

I also just plain wanted folks to see the kind of boiling, bubbling bullshit I had to put up with just because men can’t take a joke—even though, as the stereotype goes, it is feminists who are the humorless fun police. I make a crack about a non-existent gun vaporizer, and some guy named Mark suggests forcibly removing my “bloody tampons & apply the crusted blood &piss as makeup” on my “nasty face.”

Let me run that one by you again. A guy hears a joke second-, third-, maybe even fourth-hand, and his reaction is to fantasize about assaulting me with my own bodily fluids.

Perhaps this man sees himself as one of the apocryphal “good guys with a gun” who the NRA claims are necessary to stop crime. So too, the good-hearted brothers, sons and fathers of Open Carry Tarrant County, who, by some group members’ own admission, want to use my picture for target practice.

Good guys with guns, indeed. Certainly what we need are more reasonable, cool-headed men like these running around a grocery store with pistols just in case any “bad guys” show up.

Many of my guy friends were horrified. They expressed sympathy and fear on my behalf. Several of them—independent of each other, guys who wouldn’t know the others to say hello at the corner store—offered assistance, should I need it. They sent me their phone numbers “just in case” and let me know that they would be on the scene in minutes if anything scary were to happen.

I appreciate these demonstrations. I’m glad and proud to know men like these guys. They are good dudes. But giving me a phone number doesn’t stop men who hate women from threatening to rape and murder me.

I don’t need men to individually and personally step up to protect me. I need them to collect their fellow dudes and actively work, every day, to end widespread cultural misogyny and to improve the lives of non-cisgender-dude people the world over.

Good dudes of the world, please hear me out: Not actively being a sexist shitbag as an individual is not enough. Because somewhere, somehow, the guys who dedicated themselves to harassing me—many of them under their real names on Facebook—have brothers, dads, uncles, golf buddies, tennis partners, co-workers, favorite bartenders, and an entire universe of dude friends and acquaintances, all of whom have failed to make it clear, either through their words or their actions, that this kind of behavior is not OK.

Perhaps you will plead ignorance. Perhaps y’all didn’t know how bad it was. That’s fair, and I am sympathetic to that. Often, women who are harassed are told to ignore it (this is actually one of the suggested responses that Twitter provided after I reported the guy who told me he hopes I get “gunned down in the street”), to keep it quiet, to just pretend like it doesn’t exist and it’ll all go away. I have done that on many occasions. I probably even do it on most occasions, because if I re-tweeted every creepy rape threat I got, it would fill up a quarter of my feed.

But I’m telling you now. I’m showing you now. Now you know.

Now you can do something about it. You can start by sharing this very article with your guy friends, so that they too will no longer live in ignorance. You can read and share this fantastic, in-depth piece from my colleague Imani Gandy, detailing her two-year ordeal trying to keep a dedicated online stalker at bay. You can read about Lindy West’s travails trying to report threats of gendered violence.

Looking for more than just a first-person account? There’s plenty of research available concerning gendered harassment online. Have a gander at this piece in Time. Or this one in Slate. Or this one in the Pacific Standard.

And you can talk about them, proactively, with your buddies. Because I know how guys talk. They talk like people, right? They talk about politics and beer and clothes and good shit they read on the Internet today. They share how they think and feel about things. Do that.

Take five or ten minutes out of that conversation you were about to have about Ted Cruz and talk about how fucked up misogyny is instead. Talk about the statistics on gendered violence online and off. Let your guy friends know that dudes are spewing this kind of virulent shit at people like me, and that you don’t stand for it, and that you won’t stand for the men you know doing it—or ignoring it. You have to end the culture of ignorance and silence that allows guys to comfortably engage in this kind of harassment.

I mean, sure, gather your roommates around the kitchen table to watch the funny video of the dog who can’t catch a damn piece of pizza, but also make an effort to consume and share media created by people who aren’t cisgender guys. Read books written by people who don’t look like you. Watch movies directed by people who don’t just reflect your own experiences back to you.

And then talk about them with your friends, and engage with them just as you would with anything else you liked, or didn’t like, or felt confused by. Women are people, for fuck’s sake. We’re more than just your moms and wives and partners and daughters: We create things, we have stories to tell. When we are only seen as sexual objects (note how many times guys lobbed “gutter slut” and variations at me), or delicate flowers to be protected, we lose our agency and our humanity, and harassment like this is allowed to live on.

I am asking you to do a very simple thing. I am asking you to not be a sexist jerk, and I am asking you to be deliberately public about it.

Be the guy in front of whom the next Mark knows he can’t get away with threatening to assault someone with a bloody tampon. Don’t just talk to me about misogyny. Talk to him about misogyny. Call out your friends. Be brave. Women can’t make this cultural shift happen all on our own.

Because Mark, and guys like him, aren’t listening to me. But they might listen to you, and you never know when they’re paying attention.

I’m not sure I really knew what "empowered" meant until I realized I had information that no ALEC-fueled lawmaker could take away from me—or from the dozens of other Texans who are now spreading the word about the World Health Organization protocols for misoprostol use.

I bought the good boxed wine last fall when I invited my friends over to my place to learn the World Health Organization’s protocols for inducing safe abortion with misoprostol. Hell, I even broke out my special glasses from Pier One. Somebody brought fancy cheese. As we curled up on my living room’s puffy white sectional and started discussing our bodies, we could have passed for one of those yogurt commercials where people are always talking in stilted euphemisms about bowel irregularity. Instead, we were chatting about self-induced abortions.

Abortions in theory, you understand. I don’t tell people that they should induce safe abortions on their own outside of a legal abortion facility, or instruct them in how they, personally, can do so. That is illegal.

What I do tell people is that the World Health Organization has publicly made available information that explains how a pregnant person might induce an abortion using misoprostol, a drug with a variety of other medical uses, including treating ulcers in humans and arthritis in dogs. I share those WHO protocols—again, totally, publicly available information—with people who want to learn them.

In addition to the wine and cheese, I also set out a little bowl of mini-M&M’s so my friends could better understand how the WHO protocols would work. A person would put four misoprostol pills—about the size of those M&M’s, but hexagonal—in the little pocket between their tongue and the bottom of their mouth, and they would wait half an hour for those pills to dissolve. Three hours later, they would do the same with another four pills, and one more time, three hours later, the same again.

The woman who taught me the WHO guidelines for inducing abortion with “miso,” right down to the M&Ms, has traveled around the world sharing them with people living in countries where abortion is illegal: Indonesia, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey. Now, Laura—not her real name—has turned her attention to Texas.

Laura told me that what makes her especially “nutty” is that America has gone so far backward on abortion rights in her lifetime. “I really, really, really never thought it would get this bad,” she said.

But it is bad, and it’s getting worse. In Texas, abortion access is already mostly limited to people who live in or can travel to major metropolitan areas and who can afford to make two separate trips to a legal provider, because the state requires people seeking abortion care to get an ultrasound 24 hours before their procedure.

Just one legal abortion provider remains in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley—hanging on by a very thin shoestring. People who live in West Texas and the panhandle are now often closer to the few clinics in New Mexico and Oklahoma than to the ones in the state. As for East Texas, my fingers are crossed, probably in vain, in the hopes that Louisiana’s viciously anti-choice lawmakers don’t shutter the few remaining clinics in that state—frequently easier than the ones in Houston or Dallas for rural East Texans to access.

This most recent series of attacks on Texans’ bodily autonomy began back in 2011. That’s when lawmakers first proposed mandatory ultrasounds and a $70 million cut to family planning funds. I was sure, at the time, that they’d never really go through with it. But they did. According to university researchers, those cuts to family planning providers shuttered a quarter of the state’s reproductive health-care clinics that served low-income populations.

What I’m saying is that I’ve felt helpless for a long time now, and I think a lot of Texans who care about reproductive health have too. Helpless to stem the tide of anti-choice legislation that continues here today, even after so much damage has already been done. Helpless to talk sense into anti-choice lawmakers who believe abortion causes breast cancer, or that HPV vaccines will make teenagers promiscuous, or that trans people should be put in jail for using a public bathroom. Just weeks into this year’s legislative session, lawmakers have already proposed more anti-choice bills than there are remaining legal abortion facilities in Texas.

And Texans themselves have been rendered helpless by policies that harm them by the millions, because anti-choice lawmakers are singularly focused on catering to a small base of highly conservative primary voters.

According to the University of Texas’ Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), more than 1.9 million Texans will live more than 50 miles from an abortion facility if HB 2 goes into full effect. That’s scary enough, but consider this: State lawmakers’ cuts to family planning funds ushered in a 54 percent reduction in clients served between 2011 and 2013. By the numbers, that means “pro-life” lawmakers effectively took contraception out of the hands of about 178,000 people.

Remarkably, opposition from our state’s most powerful leaders hasn’t stopped us from fighting for what we believe in. To the contrary, I think more Texans than ever are involved in the battle not only for abortion access, but for issues that span the reproductive justice spectrum: Medicaid expansion, better prenatal care, and birthing rights. We know we’re starting a long journey, but it’s a really tough one. I won’t sugarcoat that.

Even though I’ve spent years protesting anti-choice laws, writing about Texans who can’t access the medical care they need, and raising money for abortion funds, the day that I learned the WHO protocols for inducing safe abortion with misoprostol marked the first day I hadn’t felt totally frustrated in a long, long time. Finally, I didn’t feel like there was a towering pink granite building standing in the way of progress, of bodily autonomy, of…freedom.

I don’t care if that sounds dramatic or hyperbolic. It was fucking incredible. When I walked out of that first training seminar on miso, I was literally shaking. I talked a mile a minute to my husband, words tumbling out of my mouth with confused excitement, trying to parse this new, unfamiliar feeling: empowerment.

Feminists use that word a lot. We talk about empowering ourselves to make our own decisions about when and whether to have a family. We talk about empowering ourselves in the workplace. We talk about empowering ourselves to speak out against harassment and rape culture. But I’m not sure I really knew what that word meant until I realized I had knowledge that no ALEC-fueled lawmaker could take away from me—or from the dozens of other Texans who are now spreading the word about the WHO protocols for miso.

It’s happening in living rooms across the state, but particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, where Latinas have modified a “training” model into a “knowledge-sharing” model, passing along the WHO’s information to their family and friends. Now, they’re inspiring others—including me—to do the same.

I won’t pretend like the idea of learning WHO protocols for self-inducing a pregnancy termination didn’t sound a little scary at first. So much of how even pro-choice folks talk about self-induction echoes well-founded, decades-old fears about coat hangers, knitting needles, and bleach douches. But miso, according to the WHO protocols, is different. In clinical medication abortion care, doctors prescribe a combination of miso and a drug called mifepristone to induce abortion. Miso can work on its own, though, and it’s only slightly less effective than the combination.

Just hearing about miso as a possibility felt revolutionary to me. As soon as I could, I rounded up my closest friends for a knowledge-sharing session at home in Austin. I made modifications of my own to the training documents: I edited the gendered language in the instructions as much as possible, to better accommodate trans and genderqueer folks who don’t identify as women but who might need abortions.

After we grasped the basics of the protocols, we practiced repeating them and role-playing how to share them with others using non-instructive language—a task that seemed kind of embarrassing at first, but I nagged my friends through it. Before long, we had our scripts down pat.

I need to be clear: The absolute first thing I want, and what I work for every day as a journalist who writes about reproductive justice issues, is for legal abortion to be accessible and affordable on demand for everyone who needs it. I believe in a single-payer health system that funds the contraception, prenatal care, maternity care, post-natal care, and abortion care of a pregnant person’s choosing.

But I also live in Texas, where state lawmakers are actively trying to overturn Roe v. Wade. Because of this, I let people know that the WHO information exists and that it is a medically sound, evidence-based protocol. I am always careful not to advise people directly to use miso; I don’t want to break the law, and neither do others who share the WHO protocols. In Texas, assisting someone in obtaining an illegal abortion is a felony—though we can be thankful that the law prevents pregnant people themselves from being prosecuted for attempting to induce an abortion on their own.

Texans deserve this information, though. Texas’ broken social safety net makes it almost impossible for low-income people to support the pregnancies, and children, they do want to have. But no matter why any Texan needs abortion care—and I, unlike our anti-choice lawmakers, trust Texans to be able to make family planning decisions for themselves—many can’t make it to a legal abortion facility for medical services. And anyone who is willing to accept reality knows that ending legal abortion care will not end abortion itself.

That much is clear from the work that Laura has done around the world: People who don’t want to be pregnant will try to find a way. They may not be successful, and they may hurt or even kill themselves in the process, but they will try.

Knowing that, I consider it a moral imperative to share the WHO protocols with whoever wants to learn. It’s not about actually using misoprostol; it’s about knowing it’s possible.

My friend Rachel, who came over last fall for that miso session, said she left the knowledge-sharing meetup at my house with a “fulfilling, empowering kind of feeling.”

“I was having wine and hanging out with my friends, it was normal,” she told me.

And that feeling of normalcy—of destigmatizing talk about abortion—even spread into other areas of our lives. After we talked about the WHO protocols and topped off our wine glasses, another friend half-jokingly raised her hand and ventured: “I have a stupid question. What happens if you have an IUD and you need an abortion?”

Of course, it’s not a stupid question, and if you can’t take a dive into the world of Dr. Google over wine and cheese with your friends, when can you? Here we were, a room full of feminists who, either in our volunteer time or professional capacities, do all kinds of work on reproductive health care. And we finally felt able to ask the questions we’d been afraid to ask elsewhere.

Soon, we were commiserating over our wide range of experiences trying to get contraception in Texas. We were telling ridiculous stories about bad sex and good sex and love and doctors who did, and didn’t, understand our needs. We talked about our abortions and our miscarriages, our ambivalence—or not—about having kids.

I thought I knew those four friends pretty well before we learned about misoprostol together, but after that night, I felt closer than ever to all of them. I’m accustomed to spaces of resistance and defensiveness bringing folks together: It’s easy, and even fun, to bond over being angry at lawmakers who don’t trust Texans with their own bodies.

But nothing compares to the feeling of solidarity that came from learning together, from being proactive, from feeling like we were finally able to do something other than fight against. I felt like we were finally fighting for.

At The New Republic, writer Monica Potts recently positioned trans activism at women's colleges as a distraction from feminism. In reality, the misogyny trans women face is similar to, if not worse than, the kind Potts is fighting.

It seems that every few months left-leaning media outlets come out with a newwave of “edgy” op-eds pitting trans people, often trans women specifically, as agents of the patriarchy intent on destroying feminism. Many of these articles can be dismissed as sadistic bullying by people with chips on their shoulders and too much time on their hands. Others, however—like Monica Potts’ recent piece in TheNew Republic, originally headlined “Trans Activism Is Threatening Women’s Colleges’ Mission”—stem from ignorance of trans issues rather than deeply seated prejudice. Even so, writers like Potts evidently do not see trans issues as an important part of their feminism, and that flaw makes their brand of feminism incredibly dangerous.

Few things sting like having someone you admire pen an article that insinuates your defense of your own existence is a threat to an institution that has long denied you entry, as Potts did. To feminists like Potts, trans (or, as she incorrectly put it, “transgendered”) people seem to be a single gender group whose self-actualization undermines anti-misogyny efforts, instead of the incredible diversity of men, women, and many others who fall between or outside of those categories. In addition, her assertion that trans activism is a threat to the historic “sisterhood” of women’s-only colleges seems, at first, all too similar to the bigoted justifications I have heard for rejecting trans women outright from spaces like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. When I contacted Potts on Twitter, however, she explained that she was not against admitting trans women or men to women’s colleges; instead, she argued, a women’s college’s “sisterhood” could include “a whole bunch of [people],” and “I don’t think [you] have to [identify] as a woman to want to be part of the sisterhood, if that makes sense. Of course it [includes] transwomen.”

To give credit where it is due, it is nice to see someone explicitly support the idea that trans women should be considered part of the “sisterhood” of women’s institutions. But what is troubling to me are the implications of including men in that “sisterhood” as well—which, at the least, positions trans women as separate from cis women’s feminism, just as men are.

One of Potts’ main concerns is the push on women’s campuses to eradicate words like “sisterhood” from use. But this isn’t an example of trans activism, as Potts puts it, being “indistinguishable from old-school misogyny”; that’s just old-school misogyny disguised as trans activism. Trans activism fights to make a world that is better for trans people, and while trans men are an important part of that, the fight to make a place for themselves at women’s colleges has nothing to do with them being trans and everything to do with them being entitled men. Anti-trans activists may claim that womanhood is fundamentally a set of common experiences, but that is ridiculous: Women have incredibly varying lives, levels of privilege, and even expectations of gender performativity and identity. What we do have in common, however, is our oppression by the patriarchy—even the most powerful women cannot completely escape its exploitation. And therein comes one of the fundamental problems of trans men in women’s colleges. Many, especially those with access to resources, will move out of that positionality; studies show, for example, that transgender men actually benefit from increased wages. Unfortunately, because of her third-gendering of trans people, Potts sees trans men as trans first and men last—if she sees them as men at all.

And while she labels trans men’s behavior as trans activism, Potts holds trans women as being complicit in the misogynistic act of erasing women on campuses. In reality, though, we often face more aggressions in academia than our cis peers, if we’re allowed in the college at all. Contrary to Potts’ assertion that there are plenty of liberal college “safe spaces” for trans people, I can say that attending the progressive collegiate paradise of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, was a living hell for me as a transgender woman. I’ve been a feminist all my life, and yet both professors and students there told me that I didn’t understand feminism because I didn’t grow up a woman. I would be glared at every time I even walked into an LGBTQ space, let alone a women’s space. My own queer community would pressure me into not looking and acting the way I wanted to as some sort of sociological experiment (“Don’t shave your legs, it isn’t feminist. Don’t wear dresses, it isn’t feminist”). And then, after all that, I would still have beer bottles thrown at me by frat bros. I’d get attacked multiple times just trying to walk home. I’d get run off the road by a car while on bike in broad daylight. I’m not some outlier case, either. Health care, safe and gender-affirmative housing, and records are all withheld or made into a bureaucratic nightmare on college campuses, including women’s institutions.

Potts’ fallacy is the classic limitation of non-intersectional feminism, which assumes that because cisgender women are oppressed and exploited, everyone but cisgender women must be on the side of the oppressors and the exploiters. But the vast majority of issues that cisgender women have to deal with are similar to those trans women must overcome. Many anti-woman sentiments, such as reducing people to their sexual body parts, affect us too. There are exceptions on both sides, but we have far more ground for solidarity than for opposition. Unfortunately, the dominant strains of white, middle-class feminism have never been super flexible when it comes to being inclusive of problems outside their limited scopes. Instead, they will claim that it is trans women who aren’t inclusive of cis women’s struggles.

For example, Potts uses the instance of activists combating a production of the Vagina Monologues at Mount Holyoke College as an implication that trans women are anti-vagina. It is hard for me not to find this line of argument hilarious, considering many of the trans women I know are pretty desperate to get a vagina of our own. (Which, by the way, is another medically necessary procedure we are often denied or charged exorbitant amounts of money for.) But even trans women who are not trying to get a vagina are not trying to stop cis women from talking about whatever body parts they want. Just like a woman who has had a mastectomy should have the chance within feminist spaces to talk about not having breasts, just like a woman born without ovaries should have the chance to talk about motherhood, and just like intersex women should have the chance to talk about not having periods, trans women should have the chance to talk about our bodies. That does not deny cis women the opportunity to talk about theirs. Simply put, some feminist spaces, and the events and productions that occur in them, do not allow that—and that is a huge problem.

While feminists like Potts may not indulge in the absurdist shallow hate of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) like Cathy Brennan, they do seem to hold in common the belief that the truly important issues are the ones that affect the most people. They frequently prioritize topics like sexual violence and abortion rights, and suggest that any other matters of reproductive justice are distractions or derailments. It should not be overlooked, though, that these overwhelmingly white, cis, middle-class, urban individuals are less likely to be affected by problems of access, need, safety, and stigma than many other people in the United States. Still, they continue to try to obscure those differences under a broad umbrella—because to do otherwise might endanger their chance of continuing to hold the majority of the power within the mainstream feminist movement. Or, if the differences are as apparently difficult to appropriate as trans women’s issues are, these feminists instead classify them as irrelevant or a menace.

Unity, solidarity, and broad movements for social equality and liberation are based in celebrating, challenging, and recognizing our differences. I am glad that Monica Potts was at least willing to hear out my concerns on Twitter, but if she really wants, as she put it in her piece, “a fight [against patriarchy] that should be waged alongside … the one for LGBT rights,” then she and other cisgender feminists need to at a bare minimum allow us into their spaces. Not as part of a new non-sisterly sisterhood where we’re classified as belonging with trans men as allies rather than fellow feminist leaders, and not as tokens to show how hip they are with modern feminism, but as fellow women. I kid you not: It is actually that simple.

"Once you run and once you win with an unabashed progressive feminist standard, then it becomes easier for everybody else who’s running," says the chair of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus about Boxer’s legacy.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who announced Thursday that she will not seek re-election in 2016, has made a name for herself as a pugnacious champion for progressive and feminist values since she was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982. She made history with her election to the Senate in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman, when California became the first state to have two female senators serving at the same time (the other was, and still is, Dianne Feinstein).

Boxer has long promoted the health of women and families in public policy. Together with then Sen. Joe Biden, Boxer introduced 1994’s landmark Violence Against Women Act. She fought for safe drinking water, worked to pass the first-ever funding authorization for after-school programs, and established the first-ever subcommittee focused on global women’s issues. In recent years, she has championed legislation protecting abortion rights, combating sexual assault in the military and on college campuses, and making child care more affordable.

RH Reality Check spoke with Christine Pelosi, chair of the California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus and daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, about her personal experiences with Boxer as a close family friend and about Boxer’s legacy on women’s rights.

RH Reality Check: How are you feeling about the announcement that Barbara Boxer won’t run again?

Christine Pelosi: I’m still getting through the shock of it all. Selfishly, I want them to move back home to California so my daughter can grow up with her grandson! I’m looking forward to that third-generation friendship happening. But obviously as a political leader and head of the Democratic Party Women’s Caucus I just think it’s going to be impossibly hard to fill the shoes of such a progressive feminist.

RHRC: What has Boxer’s legacy been as a feminist leader?

CP: From a broader perspective, I think Barbara has truly been a champion for other women and other progressives. I remember going to her “Women Making History” luncheons, which she would do every year. She would honor women—the first woman vice president of a bank, the first woman entrepreneur to open up a certain kind of small business, women champions in the nonprofit world, in the business world, in the political world. She has never stopped lifting up other people, particularly other women, to make history with her, and I just think that generosity of spirit is so amazing.

The fact that California is one of the few states that is able to expand access to reproductive health-care services and women’s health clinics is part of her legacy as a leader. The Barbara Boxer standard of being an elected officeholder in California is being pro-choice, pro-privacy, pro-workers, pro-environment. All of that goes together, and with a living wage.

Barbara has always made sure that we understand the interconnectivity when it comes to public health—not just personal choices, but public health decisions that affect not only the size and timing of one’s family, but the health and success and aspirations of one’s family.

She was unashamed and undeterred by people who said, “Oh, those are just ‘soft issues,'” or “Those are ‘women’s issues.’” She would say, “No, these are progressive issues.” And to feminize the progressive movement, to be a voice for women, is something obvious to you and me now, but it wasn’t so obvious in the ’70s when she started. It was not so obvious in the ’80s. When people talked about what it means to be a progressive, they might talk in terms of “working people,” but they didn’t talk in terms of what they called “women’s issues.” One thing that Barbara just steadfastly refused to do was to marginalize health issues and choice issues as being “something that women talk about.” As opposed to: This is something that everybody ought to be talking about.

Even within the party structure at the time, they’d have a “women’s division.” Not just a women’s caucus, but a whole women’s division. They’d talk about, “Oh, maybe the women can have an amendment,” but it was never going to be about something substantive—we’ll leave national security to the guys, and you women can talk about women’s issues, but don’t talk about them too much and don’t scare us too much, right? And Barbara was just right out there, right up front: This is what it means to be a Democrat, a Californian, a liberal. This is what it means to be an advocate. You advocate for all the parts of people’s lives.

RHRC: Are there any specific moments in her career that exemplify these qualities for you?

CP: When my mom and Lindy Boggs and Barbara and the others went over to the Senate to protest the then Republican Senate’s efforts to disallow a vote on the Civil Rights Act amendment in 1990. Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota was saying, “You don’t belong here,” pushing the women off to the side. And Barbara just got out there, they talked to the press, they were very clear that they did belong there, not only because members of Congress have House floor privileges and Senate floor privileges, but also morally, that women have a right to be at the table. They were literally told to sit down and be quiet, and that led to Boschwitz’s demise as a senator against Paul Wellstone in the next election, and started them on a path that ended up with Boxer as a senator, and of course Nancy Pelosi being speaker of the House.

So there are many, many people along the way who have underestimated Barbara Boxer to their peril. Rudy Boschwitz was only one of them. For all the talk in California about “Maybe Boxer can’t do this, can’t do that”—they don’t know Barbara. She almost revels in being underestimated because it just means that people don’t see her coming.

And when she talked about Anita Hill and led a march of women up to the Senate steps to demand a hearing, taking a stand and saying, “I believe you Anita Hill.” That meant so much for so many women who had been dealing with sexual harassment. And she talked about being a stockbroker before she became a representative, and the sexism inherent in being a female stockbroker in the earliest parts of her professional career. Again, groundbreaking.

Now, it seems obvious—you know, something happens, people hashtag it, talk about it on Twitter. But that’s not how it was then. There was a real conspiracy of silence. Women were basically not telling their stories. The attitude was, “Look, you’re lucky to just be here in the room. Don’t blow it for everybody else by being so female.” And Barbara always told her story, always spoke her truth, and lifted up other people’s stories. There is a tremendous amount of courage that she has when she talks about her own experiences with the choices she’s faced in terms of the size and timing of her own family. And again, that may not seem as important now in this era of storytelling and the public confessional, but it was a very different time 30 years ago.

RHRC: You talked about the “Barbara Boxer standard” for statewide office in California and the state’s advances for reproductive rights. How has she affected that fight?

CP: I think she set the standard for: This is what it takes to be elected statewide in California. When she was running in 2010, remember what the fight was. Carly Fiorina was running. You had a millionaire who was going to run who was anti-choice, anti-LGBT rights, and was pro-outsourcing. And for all the people who thought, “Carly Fiorina can win because she’s moderate,” Barbara pointed out that it’s not moderate to deny women reproductive freedom. That’s not moderate at all.

I think that redefining the center, moving the center to the left, redefining the political center of gravity around reproductive freedom, was something that Barbara did. So while she didn’t need to necessarily call in to Jerry Brown and weigh in on whether he should sign a bill to expand access, her mark was already there by the standard that she set, and in the statewide work she did. And obviously in the work she and Dianne Feinstein did in the Senate to make sure that the people nominated for the judiciary coming out of California respected the right to privacy. She walks out there on that Senate floor with more votes for her than are cast for almost anybody else by virtue of being from the biggest state in the union, she and Dianne. I think that gives them that extra added benefit of creditibility.

So I think that’s what her legacy is: Once you run and once you win with an unabashed progressive feminist standard, then it becomes easier for everybody else who’s running. We’re going to be very careful about this seat and this legacy and the ideas put forward by those who would aspire to it. It’s more important than ever to have a progressive feminist voice replace her.

RHRC: What has Barbara Boxer meant to you personally?

CP: Again, that generosity of spirit. That certainly shaped me as a young activist. The most important lasting legacy I will take personally with me is, if you have the confidence of a Barbara Boxer, the confidence she instills in you, you feel so prepared to walk into a room, and it naturally occurs to you to bring other people with you. So often in politics and in the women’s movement, there is a sense that only so many people can succeed at the top. One of the things I love about Barbara is her openness and desire to say: We all do better not only economically, as Paul Wellstone would say, but politically, socially, and morally when there’s more of us in leadership.

And of course she and my mom have had a sisterhood for decades, and seeing the two of them lead together for so many years is also something that’s quite rare and unique, to see two strong women who are so close and so noncompetitive with each other other reach out and bring more people along.

And all of that while having a loving, sustained marriage, raising two great kids, having these wonderful grandchildren, and being not only a lover of humanity but also of human beings. Whether it was when we were in college and she was saying, “Girls, you shouldn’t smoke,” or when we were dating and she’d say, “You need to find somebody to marry who’s going to love you as much as your parents do.”

I remember right before Obama’s first inauguration, I was six months pregnant. I came waddling into their house the day before the inauguration and she made me a big bowl of chicken soup and sat down and was giving all of this advice. And their grandbaby had just been born, and it was just this complete other alternate universe to everybody else who might have been breaking bread with a U.S. Senator the day before the inauguration. It was: Come over to the house, have some soup, relax, let’s all spend some quiet time together. She’s still a mom, still a Jewish mother and a Jewish grandmother, and that’s not going to change.

Nearly two weeks after Brittany Maynard used Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act to end her life at the age of 29, the New Jersey General Assembly passed a similar aid in dying bill that gives terminally ill patients the right to help in precipitating their death.

Nearly two weeks after Brittany Maynard used Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act to end her life at the age of 29, the New Jersey General Assembly passed a similar aid in dying bill that gives terminally ill patients the right to help in precipitating their death. The bill’s success was likely indicative of the way Maynard’s advocacy has shaped the conversation around aid in dying laws, particularly in response to the antagonistic rhetoric espoused by the anti-choice and religious right contingents.

Bringing the Debate to the Forefront

On Thursday, November 13, the state assembly passed bill A2270, known as the Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, in a 41-31 vote. Much like the Oregon act, which was implemented in 1997, A2270 grants qualified patients the legal authority to, as the legislation reads, “self-administer medication to end life in [a] humane and dignified manner.” A2270 now awaits action from the senate, which has not given any indication as to when it will vote on the bill or whether it will pass it. Gov. Chris Christie, for his part, has publicly opposed it.

This is the second attempt to pass A2270 this year—in June, the lack of support prompted Democrats to pull it from the voting schedule. This time around, though, Assembly member John J. Burzichelli (D-Third District), who introduced A2270 in February following his sister’s 2013 death from lung cancer, felt that Maynard’s very public story helped push the bill’s popularity. “More people are interested in talking about [the bill] because it drew so much attention to the issue,” Burzichelli told NJ.com.

Before she died on November 1, Maynard had released a YouTube video detailing her decision to relocate to Oregon from California and use the state’s Death with Dignity Act. She teamed up with Compassion & Choices, a national end-of-life advocacy group, to establish the Brittany Maynard Fund and help urge other states to pass aid in dying legislation.

In a November 13 statement regarding the New Jersey bill after it passed, Compassion & Choices President Barbara Coombs Lee said of Maynard, “Brittany called on our nation to reform laws so others won’t have to move to a Dignity state for comfort and control in their dying. We’re honored to carry on her name.” Compassion & Choices declined to be interviewed for this article.

In a little more than a month, Maynard helped propel into the national spotlight a conversation that has primarily existed for decades only among those people directly involved with “death with dignity” advocacy or opposition. Her story landed features in People, USA Today, NBC News, CBS News, US Magazine, and other widely read media outlets, reaching millions of households and opening up dialogue about this human rights issue.

But Maynard’s story hasn’t only amplified the general debate. She has also drawn in “a younger crowd to think about death in a way that they haven’t been faced with before,” said Peg Sandeen, PhD, MSW, executive director of the Death with Dignity National Center in Oregon.

One major issue that faces the “death with dignity” movement, Sandeen reports, is its essential foundation: the matter of death itself. Deeply rooted in society, she said, is a “push to stay young” and “be happy and healthy and fit.” That youth culture makes it difficult to challenge the concept of death and how we choose to die.

“We have a death taboo in our county. People don’t like to talk about death,” Sandeen told RH Reality Check.

And prior to Maynard, the arguable face of the movement was the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian—a Michigan physician and “death with dignity” advocate who spent eight years in prison after a 1999 second-degree murder conviction for his role in aiding terminally ill patients in dying. He, said Sandeen, is not frequently considered a “compelling character.”

But, Sandeen continued about Maynard, “suddenly you have this beautiful young woman who has had a tragedy in her life and that’s the face that younger Americans are experiencing now and associating with Death with Dignity.”

Even before Maynard’s campaign, research showed that the strongest public support for the right to aid in dying was among people younger than 50 years old. According to a much-cited 2013 Pew Research Center survey, which is part of a larger project on end-of-life care, 65 percent of people ages 18 to 49 believe it’s morally justified to end one’s life when the suffering from pain is “too great” and improvement is bleak, while 58 percent in that age group believe the same when the person has an incurable disease. Those numbers drop only by two and one percentage points, respectively, for people between 50 and 64 years old.

However, while public polling suggests young people support aid in dying at “very, very high levels,” there is still a disconnect in how it is perceived in relevance to them, Sandeen said.

“They don’t necessarily think the issue is salient or important to them,” she told RH Reality Check.

But Maynard’s candor and amenability, she continues, spoke to a segment of the population that, while supportive, has never taken much of a public stance—whether through advocacy or dialogue—on the issue. Though it is difficult to say how much of a tangible role youths played in New Jersey, especially as the bill sits in limbo, the increase in young attention may prove to be beneficial in terms of passing Death with Dignity laws in other states too. “It would be interesting to see how that plays out in the future,” Sandeen told RH Reality Check. “I think it’s going to be very positive in pushing the movement forward.”

Behind the Opposition

Any newly inspired advocates, however, will likely run up against the same kinds of opponents that their predecessors have been facing for decades. In addition to Oregon, Vermont and Washington have similar Death with Dignity laws on the books. In 2009, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in Baxter v. Montana that terminally ill patients have the legal right to aid in dying per the state’s “constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity.” Politicians in Pennsylvania and Wyoming, too, plan to reintroduce a Death with Dignity Act early next year. But where there has been progress in these states, there has also been ample pushback—much of it from the same camps that oppose other laws preserving bodily autonomy, such as abortion rights.

As reported by USA Today, the public resistance against aid in dying generally rests on the beliefs that ending your life is morally wrong, that physicians must do “everything” to either save a patient’s life or provide palliative care, or that these laws create a “slippery slope” where the elderly and people with disabilities are abused and coerced into ending their lives.

Though these first two arguments are a matter of opinion, there is no supporting evidence for this last claim, said both Sandeen and Ed Gogol, president of Hemlock of Illinois, a national aid in dying advocacy group. According to Oregon’s 2010 report on its law, nearly 93 percent of those who used the state’s Death with Dignity law that year were enrolled in hospice care at their time of death. Similarly, per Washington state’s own report, 84 percent of those who used its law were enrolled in hospice in 2010, showing that the majority of “death with dignity” patients had been medically determined to be at the end of their life.

Both reports show that around 78 percent of patients who used either state law had cancer, and around 90-to-93 percent worried about loss of autonomy as they grew sicker. Neither report, Sandeen said, shows any evidence of abuse.

The existing laws themselves also safeguard against coercion, the experts say—as would New Jersey’s new bill. Each requires patients to be terminally ill with six months or less left to live, consult with two doctors—an attending physician and a consulting physician—make at least three requests to use the law, and undergo a waiting period.

“It’s not an impulsive decision,” Gogol told RH Reality Check about choosing to use aid in dying laws. “By making this legal and bringing it out in the open, you’re strengthening protections against coercion.”

Gogol’s group has drafted its own aid in dying legislation for its home state, the “Illinois Patient Choices at End of Life Act,” similar to Oregon’s bill. The group hopes to mount a legislative campaign to get it passed within the next few years.

In the process of doing so, it will likely have to overcome resistance from one of the major groups that have opposed Death with Dignity laws in the past. For example, anti-choice individuals and groups, including the National Right to Life and its state offshoots, have consistently worked to drum up support against these bills through political action alerts, lobbying, advertisements, social media activism, and communication strategies like well-placed op-eds in large media outlets.

However, Sandeen says, anti-choice groups are not the only members of the opposition movement. They also frequently work in tandem with organizations on the religious right to roadblock Death with Dignity laws. Most recently, that partnership was evident in the member list of the so-called New Jersey Alliance Against Doctor-Prescribed Suicide, which fought hard against A2270: The New Jersey Right to Life and International Life Services are listed alongside New Jersey Catholic Conference and the Christian Medical and Dental Association on that alliance’s website.

This tag team, of course, is nothing new—both ideological factions have ties to the defeat of various pro-choice legislation and the passage of dangerous anti-choice bills throughout the country. But while anti-choice groups do much of the legwork in terms of opposition to Death with Dignity laws, groups linked to the Catholic Church in particular tend to pay the bill, advocates say.

“In terms of opposing Death with Dignity, we do see anti-choice voices [and] anti-choice lawyers showing up, but we don’t see them making the $250,000 donations, the half-a-million dollar donations to anti-Death with Dignity campaigns,” Sandeen told RH Reality Check. “Those big institutional donations are coming from the Catholic Church.”

Sandeen points to the 2012 Death with Dignity initiative in Massachusetts as a demonstration of this financial stronghold. In her estimation, Sandeen claimed that “60 to 70 percent” of opposition funding to the ballot question, known as Question 2, came from the Catholic Church. According to data compiled by Sandeen, Catholic-affiliated groups including hospitals and dioceses donated more than $3,432,800 of the roughly $5,503,626 reportedly given to the opposition. Records kept by the Massachusetts Office of Campaign & Political Finance show both Boston Catholic Television Center, Inc. and St. John’s Seminary Corporation contributed a total of $1 million each. The ballot initiative was defeated that year.

This is a part of a larger behavior of political spending for the Catholic Church across the country. As reported in former Death with Dignity National Center Director Eli Stusman’s 2004 book, Physician-Assisted Dying: The Case for Palliative Care & Patient Choice, the Catholic Church donated about $9,050,000 in total to campaigns mounted in Washington, California, Oregon, Michigan, and Maine throughout the 1990s.

Whether this intensive funding strategy has had an effect is unclear, but public polling may provide a clue. According to Pew, in 1990, 73 percent of people believed patients should be allowed to die, while only 66 percent felt that way in 2013. In contrast, Americans’ view on whether “everything possible” should be done to save a patient’s life “in all circumstances” increased by 16 points between those years—from 15 to 31 percent.

The Archdiocese of Boston and CatholicTV did not return multiple requests for comment.

The Vatican, however, has publicly condemned Maynard’s decision to die as “reprehensible” and the overall death with dignity movement “a sin against God the Creator.” Maynard’s mother, Debbie Ziegler, recently wrote a letter beating back against those comments, defending her daughter’s choice.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the impact of the religious right was largely shown through campaign contributions, as was that of anti-choice groups. RH Reality Check was able to identity at least ten assembly members among those who voted “no” on bill A2270 who received financial support from Princeton Public Affairs, the lobbying firm hired in 2013 by the New Jersey Catholic Conference, a vocal opponent against A2270 and New Jersey Alliance Against Doctor-Prescribed Suicide member. The majority of PPA contributions were made during the 2013 statewide election season.

Among those who received money from Princeton Public Affairs, one also received campaign contributions from the anti-choice NJ Right to Life PAC, also affiliated with the alliance: Michael Carroll (R-25th District). Records list Donna M. Simon (R-16th District), meanwhile, as receiving funds from the NJ “Right to Live” PAC, which shares an address with NJ Right to Life. The anti-choice PAC also contributed to Assembly Anthony M. Bucco’s (R-25th District) campaign, although he did not receive funds from Princeton Public Affairs, and thanked Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-26th District) and Assemblyman Robert Auth (R-39th District) for their “no” votes.

The New Jersey Alliance Against Doctor-Prescribed Suicide did not return requests for comment.

Opponents of death with dignity have “learned the language of suicide is very powerful,” said Sandeen. “If you call it ‘suicide,’ that’s the way to turn the average voter off on our issue,” she told RH Reality Check.

But to use those words to describe what is essentially “end-of life care” is iniquitous, said Gogol, both from an ethical and legal point of view.

“Doctor-assisted suicide” is also a misnomer, said Gogol, as doctors don’t actually assist under Death with Dignity legislation. Rather, the physicians who consult with terminally ill patient’s act as “the gatekeeper” because their ultimate role is only to determine a patient’s qualification under the law and to prescribe the medication—but not to administer it, he said.

“Fundamentally, it’s still an act you do yourself,” Gogol told RH Reality Check.

Since Maynard has gone public, there has been little discussion about the intersection of “death with dignity” and feminism. Yet, agreed Sandeen and Gogol, both movements are deeply intertwined in doctrine and opposition because of what’s at its core: choice.

“The essential component of a civilized society is the right to control your own body,” Gogol told RH Reality Check. “It’s exactly analogous.”

Ultimately, the experts say, having the legal right to choose when and how you die when you’re terminally ill is akin to having the legal right to control one’s reproductive choices—and when and how to build a family. Considering this similarity, they say, aid in dying and broader end in life care should be a banner picked up by the feminist movement.

Sandeen, for her part, also thinks of aid in dying in broader terms of who it affects in terms of gender roles. “I sometimes think of Death with Dignity as a profoundly women’s issue because women become caregivers in the family so frequently,” said Sandeen, who was caregiver to her late husband, who in 1993 passed away from AIDS at the age of 33. “It’s certainly about choice.”

Both Sandeen and Gogol do admittedly support a person’s “desire to oppose” aid in dying. But, they say, that individual choice becomes harmful when it collectively infringes upon the liberties of terminally ill patients through legislative or voter actions that prohibit the legislation of aid in dying.

“This is a choice that should be available to people if their suffering becomes intolerable,” Gogol tells RH Reality Check. “If you think you would never want to make that choice for yourself, that’s more power to you.”

“But,” he added, “you shouldn’t try to coerce anybody else to not have that choice.”

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angrywill open at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan on December 5, and in West Los Angeles’ Landmark Nuart Cinema on December 12.

It took award-winning documentary filmmaker Mary Dore—director of numerous films for PBS, New York Times TV, A&E, and The Discovery Channel—more than 20 years to raise the money to make She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry. But Dore’s efforts paid off: The film is an insightful, inspiring, and gripping look at the historical underpinnings of contemporary feminism.

From 1966 to 1971, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry recounts, the notion that women deserved power and equality brought everyone—from seamstresses to secretaries, nurses to teachers—into the streets. They went into consciousness-raising groups, too, where they could discuss previously verboten topics such as heteronormativity and orgasms.

The headiness of the era is palpable. And while the film does not shy away from acknowledging today’s right-wing backlash against abortion, contraception, and female leadership, it makes it clear that the last 50 years have wrought big changes in the ways Americans view gender.

For one, domestic violence is now considered a crime. In addition, sexual harassment is widely denounced by a wide array of private and public employers; countless women work in occupations once thought of as exclusively male; it is no longer unusual for women to attend college or graduate school; and many men actively participate in childrearing.

These shifts, of course, did not just “happen”; they were the result of concerted organizing throughout the United States. What’s more, as Bay Area activist Fran Beal points out in the film, for many American women, feminist consciousness was a direct outgrowth of frustration with the limited roles they were allowed to play in the anti-war, civil rights, and student movement—affronts that opened their eyes to the necessity of agitating for their own liberation.

Several of the movie’s talking heads—who include Rita Mae Brown, Heather Booth, Linda Burnham, Jacqueline Ceballos, Jo Freeman, Susan Griffin, Karla Jay, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Marlene Sanders, Alix Kates Shulman, and Ellen Willis—recount being belittled and disrespected by seemingly progressive male “comrades.” Retired professor Marilyn Webb, for example, reports attempting to speak at an anti-war demonstration over catcalls and whistling. Worse, she recalls being interrupted by a man who yelled that he’d “like to drag her off the stage and fuck her.” Another interviewee remembers being told to “sit down and shut up” at Students for a Democratic Society meetings.

Similarly, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells the filmmakers about a grad school professor who threatened her: If she did not “put out,” she’d have no future in academia, he said.

Small wonder, then, that rage spread among women who felt constrained by society and disrespected by their peers. And this fury wasn’t limited to existing social movements or higher education; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a send-down of homemaking among middle-class housewives, hit a further nerve among American women. According to the film, they began to bristle at convention, challenging the norms that gave them little choice but to marry men, have children, and find domestic fulfillment in the pages of Betty Crocker cookbooks or Good Housekeeping magazines. What’s more, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry notes, they began to talk to each other about how hard it was to access contraception and abortion, critiquing their limited employment options and the overt sexism they encountered at every turn.

At the same time, the film points out that women had no roadmaps for channeling that anger—and as they formed groups to meet those needs, they often felt as if they were starting from scratch.

Many women opted to work with the newly formed National Organization for Women, while some chose to align with more radical groups like the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, or Redstockings. Still others, newly attuned to how little they knew about women’s history, joined burgeoning efforts to unearth concrete facts about our foremothers. Publications, such as No More Fun and Games and It Ain’t Me Babe, and presses, such as Shameless Hussy, flourished as outlets for feminist creativity, theories of being, and personal narratives.

It wasn’t always easy—but the film’s many sources also speak of the fun they had organizing events, connecting with other individuals, and challenging assumptions about women’s place in society.

Still, conflicts arose. One of the key strengths of She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, in fact, is that it does not shy away from the disagreements that erupted within the movement over the interplay of race, class, and gender; over the acceptability of lesbianism; and over the emergence of spokeswomen and leaders within grassroots feminist organizations—issues that continue to arise today. These inevitable clashes, in concert with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance of women’s liberation activists and groups, caused rifts and tensions. Some organizations fractured; others folded. However, the film focuses less on these splits and more on issues, such the need for legal abortion, that unified the majority of activists.

Toward that end, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry heralds the amazing work of Chicago’s Jane Collective, a well-trained group of laywomen who performed approximately 11,000 abortions between 1969 and 1973; the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which first published Our Bodies, Ourselves as a newsprint pamphlet in 1971; and the intrepid organizing that pushed the Supreme Court to issue its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

Throughout, there is footage of demonstrations and rallies—including the 1968 protest at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the 1970 march down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in honor of the 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage. It’s exciting to see the press coverage of these events alongside film of speak-outs and public hearings, all geared toward ending sexism and giving women and men equal billing.

“It felt like we had triumphed,” says the writer, activist, and artist Kate Millett. “Like we were changing the world.” Indeed, the feminists of the mid-1960s and early 1970s boldly and proudly declared that “women’s lives matter.”

Despite the progress they made, though, their issues—access to safe, legal abortion and birth control; affordable child care; an end to sterilization abuse; social and political equality for lesbians; winning economic parity with men; and recognition of domestic violence and rape as criminal acts—are now our issues.

But we should not despair: She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry underscores the fact that just because these subjects remain front and center today does not mean that our foremothers failed. As poet and writer Judith Arcana told the filmmakers: “No victories are permanent. They are only as good as our vigilance.” Needless to say, that vigilance now falls to us.

CORRECTION: The spelling of Fran Beal’s name has been corrected. We regret the error.

Some conservatives want to defend street harassers as a way to get in digs at feminists. But they might be running up against more traditional right-wingers who think harassment is evidence of the dangerous world women must be protected from.

The problem of street harassment has gotten a surge of attention in recent months, in both online and mainstream media. But unlike with issues such as abortion and equal pay, about which conservatives tend to reflexively oppose women’s rights, there is no single right-wing view on the subject of street harassment—a fact that has grown more evident in conservatives’ response to a viral video showcasing how much verbal harassment one woman faced in a single day.

In the past, conservative politicians and media pundits have tended to argue that women need to be under the control of men at all times, for the women’s own protection. They chastise women for traveling solo, living alone, going out after dark, and having sex on their own terms, on the grounds that such behavior is “dangerous.” Some even insist that women should return to marrying young in order to protect them from the supposed hazards of existing autonomously later in life. There’s clearly an ulterior motive here—preserving male power at women’s expense—but the idea that the world is a risky place for women actually fits really well with traditional, more religious conservatism. In other words, conservatives would have no cause to disbelieve women when they discussed street harassment, because it supported their notion that the outside world is too treacherous for women to move about independently.

There’s been a surge in recent months, however, of some mainstream conservatives coming at the problem of street harassment from a different angle: trying to minimize and excuse it altogether. They argue that women who object to being harangued in public all day are just oversensitive babies. It’s a bro-ish kind of sexism that’s always been around—every woman has likely had an experience of men dismissing sexual harassment as no big deal. But of late, the fringe “men’s rights” movement has organized this kind of gutter sexism into something like a coherent ideology, in which they imagine women not as delicate flowers who need protection, but as a hostile, subversive group of people who make up their own oppression to get special political favors. And now there’s some more mainstream conservatives testing that “men’s rights” flavor of sexism out, to see whether it might get the kind of traction that more traditional sexism has.

And street harassment really seems to be a major test case. Last week, a video of a woman walking around New York City for ten hours, in which she gets harassed more than 100 times, went viral. The idea for the project was a good one, but as Hanna Rosin of Slate persuasively argued, the execution created a racist narrative. Out of the many men shown in the video cat-calling, only one was white, which left a distinct impression that street harassment has a racial dynamic that it doesn’t have in real life. On Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds a mainstream conservative who writes for USA Today, twisted Rosin’s argument to imply that women who resist street harassment are doing so from a bigoted perspective.

“THAT CATCALLING VIDEO: It’s a racist production about white women not wanting attention from black and Latino men,” he wrote, linking Rosin. It was an irredeemable distortion of Rosin’s perspective. In no way, shape, or form did Rosin suggest that the harassers were just nice guys offering pleasant attention that a woman of color would be open to. On the contrary, Rosin cited the wonderful work of Jessica Williams on The Daily Show as an example of someone who made a similar point about street harassment while also being very clear that it negatively affects women of all races and is being perpetuated by men of all races. Rosin’s point was crystal clear: Street harassment is deplorable behavior, but one must not leave white men out of the equation when you’re criticizing it.

But Reynolds’s distortion was there to serve a larger purpose. He suggested that had the men in the video been of “higher status,” such as President Obama or George Clooney, “there’d be much less female outrage.” This seeks to excuse street harassment as harmless, even charming behavior—and to paint the victims as uptight narcissists for not dropping what we’re doing to give men the attention they demand whenever they demand it.

Fox News, too, has leaned particularly hard on the defense of street harassment. The Five on Fox News did a segment on the video largely devoted to making excuses for cat-callers. Eric Bolling claimed it was all “complimentary.” Greg Gutfeld pitied the harassers, painting them as out-of-touch Romeos who just need some love. Bob Beckel actually cat-called the subject herself, saying, “Damn, baby, you’re a piece of woman.” Because he was overtly doing this to put the subject in her place, this truly undercut the panelists’ point that harassment is a compliment. Instead, as most women know, it’s a dominance game meant to make women feel bad or scared.

This was hardly the only time, though, that a Fox News host not only defended street harassment, but demanded praise and attention for his own skill at participating it. Back in August, as a guest host on Outnumbered, Arthur Aidala showed off his “slow clap” that he uses to harass women on the street. In response, panelist Kimberly Guilfoyle said, “let men be men.” (Never mind that most men don’t street harass.)

Overall, there’s still a little uneasiness about the subject—the female hosts tend to express mixed feelings instead of actual praise for the behavior—but an MRA-style pro-harassment argument is clearly being beta-tested here.

At this point, writing off street harassment as “no big deal” seems like just a bridge too far, particularly seeing as how the “toughen up, ladies” argument really undermines traditional arguments in favor of limiting women’s freedom for their own protection.

For his part, Rush Limbaugh recently tried to thread that needle, trying an argument that allows the reflexive attacks on feminism without actually endorsing street harassment outright. In it, he blamed feminism for street harassment, saying that since feminists first identified this as a problem in the ’60s (in reality, it was well before that) and it hasn’t been licked yet, it’s because feminists are failures. Of course, by the same token, Rush Limbaugh is a failure, because he’s been doing his thing since the ’80s and hasn’t managed to stomp out liberalism. But if logic isn’t his strong suit, we sure can’t ask him for some consistency.

It will be interesting to see where this all goes. Conservatives are already unhappy with the “war on women” meme, arguing that their attacks on women are about things other than misogyny, like “life” or “religious freedom.” In that atmosphere, aggressively defending the act of bothering women on the street simply because you feel entitled to their attention is basically inviting people to say that no, conservatives are simply sexist. But the desire to fight back against feminism in all its forms is in the mix too. Time will tell which urge wins out.